Davean wrote:Only the bots can see the entire forum the mods have dedicated to bashing taptap for asking questions with obvious answers. It should look good when his next interviewer Googles him before the interview.

eryanv wrote:I'm not sure I get how the alt text relates to this comic, except being a very unusual name. Is it a reference to something?

I'm not sure whether to spoil this or not...

Ah, what the hell.

Spoiler:

If the girl's name is "Help I'm trapped in a driver's license factory", then, her driver's license would read, "Help I'm trapped in a driver's license factory", which might indicate to someone who looked at it that there was some person trapped in a driver's license factory trying desperately to escape and communicating with the outside world via the licenses that he or she produced while trapped in the factory.

I loved it. I laughed harder at the alt-text than at the comic itself.

eryanv wrote:I'm not sure I get how the alt text relates to this comic, except being a very unusual name. Is it a reference to something?

Perhaps http://xkcd.com/10/Though I seem to recall "help im trapped in a __ factory" from some poem or douglas adam-esque story...

It also shares similarities with a quote from Hogfather, found on a note from inside a fortune cookie: "Help help help Ive fallen in the crakker machine I cant keep runin on this roller please get me out"

I must say, the tooltips are what really make these comics so great. If the comic is so-so, the text makes up for it. If the comic is awesome (like this one), the text adds an extra laugh. I always have to wait until just before my laughter dies down before I put my mouse over the picture. That way, I get maximum enjoyment.

"Duct tape is like the Force. It has a light side, a dark side, and it holds the universe together." --Carl Zwanzig

Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that it would look like the this? It isn't as neat, but shows the necessity of the --. The purpose of the -- is easier to see, however, when considering a situation where the values aren't inserted with the name last:

However, as my knowledge of SQL implementations is rather rudimentary, I'm not sure whether the exploit would actually work in this case, due to the mismatch between the number of values and the number of columns.

tesseract wrote:If any of the XKCDs deserve to be done in real life, this is it. Who will volunteer to change their name?

If a database is destroyed by someone who has changed their name in such a way, has that person broken the law? I can see ways that such a case could be argued, at least in the US, but the legal arguments could prove rather amusing and interesting. In fact, a whole host of such situations could be considered: if, for example, one changes one's name to "Fire!", and someone calls one's name in a crowded room, who is at fault?

Changing one's name to "Help I'm trapped in a driver's licence factory" should, of course, be legal, but one would need to find out whether driver's licences in one's area would have the whole name printed on them, or one might receive something like "Help factory" or some other unfortunate and unintended combination. I do know from experience, however, that the California DMV will split long names onto two different lines, so it might be possible to have the whole name.

Do I dareDisturb the universe? In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse

And, more recently and explicitly similarly, on Cory Doctorow's August 5th podcast, here, a little ways in, where he discusses how his wife refused to allow him to name his daughter in such a manner, and also didn't allow him to name her Abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz.

Clearly this is the sort of thing that many different nerds can come up with independently, but still...

This was an awesome comic. I've been carrying on about this sort of thing in the work i'm doing and no one's taking much notice. Armed with a comic stuck on the communal whiteboard, they can't ignore me now!